Stage 2

Sometimes we concentrate too much on the negatives, some call this pessimism, others realism. We shout when we want to change something, but stay silent when things are good. It is seen everywhere including with adopters. I am guilty of this. I have written many posts detailing the bad time we had during our matching … Continue reading Where’s the Positivity?

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So, just before being able to write a post about Matching Panel I was “advised” to stop writing my blog publicly. This post is the first one I’ve written since then and is intended to be privately published. Despite having been “advised” for a good 10 minutes about why I shouldn’t write it I am still unclear on the precise reasoning behind it.

Anyway, we had Panel. We were asked a few questions about how we will cope, including about recent losses and how that will affect OH. We were asked about how we would deal with questions about birth Mum and Mummy things (the asker clarified she wasn’t asking because we are a male couple, although in my opinion the way she asked made this clear anyway). I got asked about this blog (this was a little unexpected, but I knew my SW knows about it, so it no…

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Introductions have been an amazing experience. Wonderful, exciting, nerve wracking, and tiring. One thing is clear though, if you have a good foster family helping you things go a lot better than they otherwise would. Introductions are customised to the age of the child/children that you're being introduced to. Younger ones tend to have a … Continue reading Introductions

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Introductions are over and we are now in full Parental Responsibility mode. Before I say anything about the introductions in general I have a list of observations. 1. Get used to drinking formerly hot drinks cold, or only half of them, or not at all. Certainly get used to searching for randomly placed cups with … Continue reading And so it begins…

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One year ago today we officially got accepted onto the adoption agency's books, and entered The Process. One year later we met our children for the first time. From the outset it was clear that the foster carer had been preparing them for meeting us and the first words spoken, fairly unprompted, by one of … Continue reading Introducing Introductions

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Yesterday was crunch day. The day that our assessment has been leading up to over the past few months - PANEL DAY! It doesn't matter how much people tell you that Approval Panel isn't as daunting as it seems, that we'll be fine, that it's not that bad etc, etc. Until you're in there speaking to … Continue reading Approval Panel

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It has been about 2 weeks since my last post and of the three things that I said we expected to happen in that time have happened. For the most part at least. We received the draft copy of the PAR. For those of you unfamiliar with what a PAR is, it is basically all … Continue reading Connections

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This past week and bit has been eventful in some ways and really not in others. We attended some training on Tuesday about how the matching process works both from ours and the children's perspectives. It seems like we've inadvertently already started this process even though we're not approved yet. We have signed up to … Continue reading Matching & Marriage

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The final assessment session (7) has been completed. We're now on the countdown towards our approval panel date. The subjects of this session were "Identity" and (yet again) "Child Care". Identity was a little bit woolly to begin with, and attempting to define what I considered to be my identity was odd. Eventually, to make … Continue reading The Final Countdown

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Yesterday everything became real. We aren't just being assessed to be approved to be adoptive parents. We WILL become parents (subject to approval of course). Our social worker decided to do our profile before the Christmas break and sent it to us yesterday. It's a really nice write up including a few pictures (which I … Continue reading Not Just an Assessment